“The Canterbury Tales was written . . . during what the Middle Ages would have considered Chaucer’s old age . . . It is a quite astonishing production . . . [He was] free to experiment with narrative in a more audacious way, to challenge orthodoxies old and yet to be formulated, and to explore, exploit, enrich and subvert all the many available kinds of medieval story.” –from the Introduction by Derek Pearsall
